This double bill consists of two thematically related works, Clear Pale Skin and Australia's Most Wanted: ballet for contemporary democracy. Spurning the notion of the arts as elitist and proscriptive, Chunky Move has delved into the problem of desire by gathering as many examples of it as possible. The first instalment, Clear Pale Skin, explores the desire for perfection and the anxiety, envy and obsession that inevitably arises from its pursuit. The 'fallout of faultlessness' reaches new heights of farce as puppet school graduates win their dream job at Dreamworld and dance students succumb to made-to-measure madness.

<B>Asking the audience what they want can be a funny thing, reports Jane Faulkner.</B>

Gideon Obarzanek doesn't have a great sense of humour. He's not humourless, but Chunky Move's artistic director and choreographer admits he's a serious type. And that's funny because one of his works is part of the Melbourne International Comedy festival - the first time dance has been included in the line-up.

They're the results choreographer Gideon Obarzanek discovered when he commissioned a survey about dance during the creation of Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy, a one-hour work that needed almost no choreography.

Knowing that this work comes from Gideon Obarzanek and Chunky Move, it's immediately obvious that its title is one with attitude - that the piece itself is likely to be witty, slightly twisted and provocative.

And so it is. Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy could have been subtitled Gideon's Revenge in that he has asked the public what they liked and given it to them - well, the 632 people who answered his Australia-wide survey.

He has brought together isolated elements of contemporary dance, dressed them in satirical exaggeration, then lined them up in front of his audience like an anthology of bad taste.

<B>Cheeky moves mock market research</B> April 21 2003 By Hilary Crampton The Age

<B>Chunky Move: Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy, Melbourne Town Hall, April 15</B>

The oft-quoted relationship between lies, damned lies and statistics is wickedly illustrated in Chunky Move's cheeky Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy.

One could read it as a cynical marketing exercise, a sly dig at managerial agendas gone mad, or an uncharitable poke at audience naivety and the carping of critics. Well, this re-run of a ballet developed from a survey of dance audience likes and dislikes is all of those things.

Knowing that this work comes from Gideon Obarzanek and Chunky Move, it's immediately obvious that its title is one with attitude - that the piece itself is likely to be witty, slightly twisted and provocative.

And so it is. Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy could have been subtitled Gideon's Revenge in that he has asked the public what they liked and given it to them - well, the 632 people who answered his Australia-wide survey.

The tension in moving worlds By Hilary Crampton October 7, 2003 The Age

Tense Dave is a surreal narrative, co-created by Lucy Guerin, Michael Kantor and Gideon Obarzanek. Our anti-hero, Dave, played by Brian Lucas, is a colourless and ungainly personality. He finds himself in the midst of a collection of extreme characters, observing them with mute horror, gradually becoming entangled in their fantasies.

Chunky Move artistic director Gideon Obarzanek invited Lang to stage the work with his company after seeing it performed twice in Europe by Ballett Frankfurt. "It's conceptually a really strong work, but the concept is applied to something that's actually quite organic," says Obarzanek, "so it's simultaneously an experiment and a poem".

Things Are Spinning, Starting With the Stageby JOHN ROCKWELL for the New York Times

From the staging standpoint, the central device is a nearly constantly revolving circular stage, spinning at different speeds and divided by moving panels that sometimes form pie-piece-shaped rooms, sometimes walls or chambers on an otherwise bare space. The idea is to provide a cinematic fluidity that fixed stages inevitably lack.

Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek has directed this work [I Want to Dance Better at Parties] with a tight focus. When venturing away from the literal, there are clear parallels drawn between the action and the interviews, yet they are never boringly obvious.

&lt;B&gt;Australians ride recovery wave in New York&lt;/B&gt; &lt;BR&gt;By PHILLIP McCARTHY in The Age&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;The days can be strange in New York now, but the Brooklyn Academy of Music's executive producer, Joe Melillo, had a particularly surreal one last week. On Wednesday evening he had Chunky Move, the Melbourne dance troupe, opening its Next Wave Down Under season. But he spent the morning at City Hall in Manhattan finding out that the city's new fiscal crisis would mean a 15 per cent cut to his grant money. &lt;P&gt;&lt;A HREF="http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/10/16/FFXFHX36TSC.html" TARGET=_blank&gt;&lt;B&gt;click for more&lt;/B&gt;&lt;/A&gt;

Chunky Move choreographer and dancer, Jo Lloyd has teamed up with inventive multi-media art collective, Off Nibroll, to explore "public and private behaviour and the similarities and differences between growing up in Japan and Australia".

The result, he says, is that while the other five performers are shuddering, shimmying and slithering across, and inside, the mobile boxes that comprise the Singularity set, Hamilton is a study in anguished restraint. While his feet hardly leave the ground, his body, hand and face movements are minute and jerky, giving the effect of an animated film grinding to a halt. It's like he's been caught in a strobe light.

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